Split Second (36 page)

Wexler’s eyes widened and he
bolted into a seated position on the bed like he had been launched from a
catapult. Jenna had never seen him this excited about anything.

“Now
that
is something worth sinking my teeth into,” he said excitedly. “I
have no idea what to think of all the implications of time travel. But I know
for certain what I think about interstellar travel. I’m all for it.”

Jenna laughed. “I thought you might
be,” she said.

“Think about what practical
interstellar travel could mean. Humanity could spread to the stars. Spread out
to infinity. Survive its adolescence. Even if an Edgar Knight destroyed an
entire world, the species would thrive.”

“And who knows,” said Jenna, “this
could be right around the corner. Tomorrow, after you get to know Lee, Joe, and
Aaron better, and after a full debriefing, Lee is going to offer you a position
on the team.” She grinned. “And by
offer
,
I mean beg. And by
position
, I mean
basically the Chief Scientific Officer of the organization, with unlimited
resources.”

Wexler nodded thoughtfully.

“Now that Knight is out of the
picture,” continued Jenna, “we’re free to go back to our lives, of course. But
I’ve really begun to like these people. Aaron is flat-out amazing, as a
detective, as a commando, and as a human being. I can’t wait to hear how he
managed to get you out of there, and I have some Aaron Blake stories of my own
to tell. As far as I can tell, Lee and Joe are good men also.”

“So you would recommend we join
them?”

“I would. But I’ve had a chance
to get to know them. So take your time. Do the same. And then decide.”

“You have yourself a deal.”

“Good. And while you’re at it,
if you do decide to join Q5, I think we should get married. Make it official.”

Wexler’s jaw dropped to the
floor. “Sounds good to me,” he said after he had gotten over his initial shock.
“If I’m remembering right, you’ve always been the one who didn’t want to hassle
with this. I’ve been pretending we’re already married for over a year now
anyway.”

“Then it’s settled,” said Jenna,
who realized her new eagerness to finally tie the knot was a direct result of
having seen Nathan die. Maybe this
would
be a good technique for couples therapy, after all. “But if we’re going to
marry, I have one request.”

“Anything,” said Wexler.

“I get to choose the location of
our honeymoon.”

“Done,” he said immediately. He
raised his eyebrows. “Anywhere in particular you had in mind?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said,
breaking into a broad grin, “I do. Just outside the rings of Saturn. In an experimental
spacecraft that we’d beam there. Of course, this will require you to figure out
how to use the fifth dimension to push through space, rather than time.”

“Of course,” said the physicist in
amusement. “I was guessing you’d want to honeymoon at a resort in Hawaii. But,
you know, the rings of Saturn would have been my next guess.”

Jenna laughed. “And just so I
don’t put any undue pressure on you,” she said, “I’m willing to postpone the
honeymoon until you’ve succeeded. I realize that coming up with the most
profound breakthrough in human history might take you a while.” She shot him a
playful look. “But don’t take
too
long.”

Nathan Wexler grinned. “Yes,
ma’am,” he said, his eyes dancing. “I’ll get to work on that right away.”

From the Author
: Thanks for reading
Split Second
.
 
I hope that you enjoyed it. As always, I’d be
grateful if you would consider putting up however many stars you believe the
novel deserves on its Amazon page, as this is immensely helpful in getting a
book noticed.

Finally,
feel free to visit my
website
(where
you can get on a mailing list to be notified of new releases), Friend me on
Facebook at
Douglas E. Richards Author
,
or write to me at [email protected].

SPLIT SECOND: What’s Real, and What Isn’t

As
you may know, I conduct fairly extensive research for all of my novels. In
addition to trying to tell the most compelling stories I possibly can, I strive
to introduce concepts and accurate information that I hope will prove
fascinating, thought-provoking, and even controversial.

Although
Split Second
is a work of fiction and
contains considerable speculation, some of it does reflect reality. Naturally,
within the context of a thriller, it is impossible for me to go into the depth
each topic deserves, nor present the topic from all possible angles. I
encourage interested readers to read further to get a more thorough and nuanced
look at each topic, and weigh any conflicting data, opinions, and
interpretations. By so doing, you can decide for yourself what is accurate and
arrive at your own view of the subject matter.

Before I begin, I have to report there were many times
during the writing of this novel that I thought I must be crazy for attempting
this particular plot. Thinking about the logic of time travel made my brain
hurt, and I pulled out handfuls of hair on numerous occasions trying to wrestle
this to the ground.

Time travel is always complex, but when you’re dealing
with only forty-five microseconds, duplication, teleportation, paradox,
possible branching timelines, and so on, it can be maddening to figure out,
especially if you’re trying to get it as logical and self-consistent as
possible. I spent many hours filling pages with diagrams and having to
repeatedly change the plot when I realized I had gotten the logic wrong. And if
trying to understand the complexities of this particular plot wasn’t difficult
enough, trying to explain it in a way that had any chance of being
understandable in fewer than a million pages was challenging as well.

This being said, since no one really knows how time
travel might work, I had to take certain liberties in telling this story that
didn’t have a firm basis in logic, and I can’t guarantee I didn’t miss
something in my analysis. All I can say for sure is that I did the best I
could.

With this out of the way, let me get right to the meat
and potatoes:

Idiocracy (or Are We Getting Dumber?):
This is a real movie,
with the premise I outlined in the novel. I found this movie amusing, but be
warned that it isn’t for every taste, and many might find it offensive.

As to the accuracy of the
movie’s premise, this is controversial, and very complicated, so for those who
are interested, I would recommend Googling
fertility
and intelligence
,
dysgenics
, and
the
Idiocracy
effect
.

From my research (and, as
always, my analysis is not infallible, so I encourage readers to come to their
own conclusions) it appears that studies do show an inverse correlation between
education and fertility, such that the more educated you are, the fewer
children you will have,
on average
. A
1991 study, for example, conducted by the US Census Bureau, found that high
school dropouts averaged 2.5 children, whereas college graduates averaged only
1.56 children.

This inverse correlation also
seems to exist between wealth and fertility, at the individual level and with
respect to nations, which has been named the demographic-economic paradox. To
illustrate this point, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India,
famously said, “Development is the best contraceptive.”

While there is some correlation
between educational attainment and intelligence, IQ isn’t entirely determined
by genes, and there are other complicating factors, so the higher reproductive
rates among the less wealthy and less educated translate into a fairly small reduction
of species intelligence (and again, this is quite controversial and still under
discussion). Even so, over centuries and millennium, this could have a very
noticeable effect.

Critics of this analysis point
to something called the Flynn effect, which is the observation that average IQs
have actually been slowly rising since 1930, most likely due to better
nutrition and quality of life, although new studies have shown this trend
slowing or even reversing of late. Proponents of the
Idiocracy
view suggest that these average rises would have been
even greater if not for the increased fertility of the less intelligent, and
point to the recent reversals.

This last reminds me of a
conversation I had with my mother. I was born in the days before women were
warned about smoking and drinking while pregnant. (These were also the days in
which my sister and I would never wear a seatbelt, would sleep on a platform against
the window above the backseat of our car, and in which my sister would slather
oil on herself and use a reflecting shield to maximize the amount of sun
hitting her body while at the beach).

When I learned that my mother smoked
while she was pregnant with me, I teased her about this. She would have none of
it. “My smoking obviously had no affect on you,” she insisted. “Look how smart
you turned out to be.” To which I replied playfully, “Yeah, but think of how
smart I
could
have been.”

Dark Matter and Dark Energy:
The information presented with
respect to dark energy, dark matter, quintessence, the ancients’ belief that
the world was composed of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), that we
are totally clueless about the composition of a vast majority of our universe,
and so on, is as accurate as I could make it, although highly summarized and
not rigorously presented.

The following passage is
entirely fictional:

“Nathan told me that physicists were making some progress identifying
this energy, but he was certain there would never be a way to use it. You could
tap in—maybe—but even if you managed this, Nathan’s calculations, and those of
others, showed you’d never be able to control it. It would be all or nothing.
Drinking from a
firehose
. Tap it and the minimum
energy you would release would be more than enough to vaporize the Earth,
possibly the entire solar system.”

What I find most fascinating about
all of this is how little we really understand our universe. Despite the
amazing progress we have made, we may only be scratching the surface. While
this is sobering, it is also exciting. Humanity has accomplished quite a lot,
but think of what we might be able to accomplish if we could unlock the many
mysteries still remaining.

The Nature of Time:
I endeavored to make this entire
discussion as accurate as possible, but this is a very complicated subject, and
I hope I didn’t make readers too crazy and confused. The relational theory of
time is real, although I’ll leave it to readers to decide for themselves if
they think time could exist before the universe came into being. The block
universe is a real concept that falls out of relativity, and one to which many
scientists (including Einstein) subscribe.

I find Zeno’s paradoxes a lot of
fun, and I encourage you to Google them. I included the one about the two
arrows frozen in time, although I’m not sure how clearly I was able to get
across the point of this in the limited space I allowed myself for this task.

My favorite of these paradoxes is
called
Achilles and the Tortoise
.
Imagine a tortoise is given a large head start in a race. Well, before Achilles
can catch the slow critter, he has to travel half the distance they are
separated. But while he’s traveling half, the tortoise is also moving ahead. So
now he again must travel half the remaining distance before he can catch the
reptile. But again, in the time this takes, the tortoise will have moved
forward a small amount. By the time he travels half the remaining distance
again, which continues to shorten, the tortoise moves forward again. And so on,
forever.

In this way, thousands of years
ago, Zeno presented a logical argument that Achilles should never be able to
catch up to the tortoise, in a way that was quite difficult to disprove for
some time (even though we all know Achilles will, in fact, catch and pass the
tortoise).

Apologies if my abbreviated presentation
of this paradox isn’t clear, and I won’t take the time to provide the
resolution to it here, but if you’re interested, just Google
Achilles and the Tortoise
and you will
find all you need.

Time Travel:
Feynman diagrams are real. They do model
antimatter as going backward in time, and are exceedingly useful. Richard
Feynman was a remarkable man, and this is just one of his many contributions to
science.

The chronology protection
conjecture is an actual concept. The idea of retrocausality is real, and
certain experiments with entangled particles in quantum physics suggest that an
observation made now can change something that happened in the past. I didn’t
include these experiments because the background required to understand them is
fairly extensive (and I have to admit, I don’t fully understand them myself :)).

The logic of duplication and translocation
is my own, but it makes some sense, at least to me. Duplication isn’t all that
controversial, appearing in countless works of fiction. I’m sure we all
remember scenes in which two Marty
McFlys
exist at
the same time (one on stage performing and one backstage).

To my knowledge, however,
duplication, with or without translocation, has never been presented as the
sole point of time travel the way it is in
Split
Second
, and all time travel stories with which I am familiar send people
and objects back hours, days, and years, rather than millionths of a second.

When I began the novel, I
thought I had two basic choices for how time travel would work. Either time
travel only affected a single timeline, or time branched whenever time travel
caused a change in the past. For a variety of plot-related reasons I won’t go
into here, I couldn’t use the single timeline. But the idea of infinite
branching timelines bothered me. The more I thought about this, the more I
didn’t like it.

If you wanted ten copies of
Nathan Wexler, you would get ten different universes, each branch containing a
different number of Wexlers, one through ten. And if you repeated this a
million times, as you would need to do to scale up an infinitesimal amount of
explosive, for example, you’d be creating a million different universes. This
just seemed wasteful to me, and if this many universes were allowed, who would really
care what happened in the one featured in the narrative?

So I came up with a blended
model, which is presented in the book. A single timeline that ignores paradox.
A universe that just accepts where it is at, without worrying about how it got
there, and moves forward on this basis. And this I came to really like. It
brought to mind the way I write novels, and made great sense in this context.
My novels are my own personal universes, and sometimes the cause of a change I
make no longer exists (because it came from a different universe, a different
version of the novel). But even without a discernible cause, the effect
remains. The novel goes forward, just accepting the change, and not caring how
it came to be.

After I had the rudiments of the
Split Second
plot worked out, I read
four books on time travel,
How to Build a
Time Machine
(Brian Clegg),
Time
Travel in Einstein’s Universe
(J. Richard Gott),
Time, a Traveler’s Guide
(Clifford A. Pickover), and
Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics,
Metaphysics, and Science Fiction
(Paul J. Nahin).

Sadly, while there was some
fascinating material here, almost none of it was useful for my novel. It was
either too complex, not relevant to my plot, or required engineering impossible
even for a species a thousand times more capable than ours (creating wormholes,
rotating Tipler cylinders, and so on).

In this case, since I couldn’t
find anything scientifically feasible that could work, I created my device from
whole cloth. Siphon a massive amount of the nearly infinite energy of the dark
energy field (which is real), use this to drive matter through the fifth
dimension (which could be real, but hasn’t been proven), and voila, time travel
to 45.15 microseconds in the past (chosen because I thought 58 feet was a good
distance).

Earth’s Movement:
The paragraph detailing the Earth’s various
movements through space (rotation, revolution, etc.) is accurate, at least
according to
Scientific American
. We
really are moving through the universe at 242 miles per second.

The
Star Trek
Transporter:
Alas,
many, if not most scientists believe that Captain Kirk is destroyed and
recreated each time he “travels” through the transporter. I find this
fascinating. Even knowing this, Edgar Knight would happily use such a device. I
encourage you to consider what you would do. I’ve given it a lot of thought,
but haven’t firmly decided if I would use a transporter or not.

I considered addressing some of
the philosophical implications of this in the novel, but finally decided
against it. Here is one example: Basically, the cells in your body are dying
and being replaced all the time. It isn’t clear if 100% of your cells are
replaced during your lifetime, or how long this might take if they are, but a
common, albeit controversial figure often cited is seven years (if you Google,
“does the human body replace itself every seven years” you will find any number
of articles on this subject).